After I passed an IT certification test I did say a silent atheist prayer (I can still believe in the Doctor, right?), for the me in a parallel universe who failed. I'm not even sure it was necessary. I suspect there are universes that cheat horribly. Energy destroyed all the time (or at least shunted into other universes, since the Evil Goatee Universe even cheats at cheating). The speed of light is the second gear on a Peugeot hatchback. And Schrödinger's cat is just undead (that back and forth is for wuss universes).

TheSilverKey:After I passed an IT certification test I did say a silent atheist prayer (I can still believe in the Doctor, right?), for the me in a parallel universe who failed. I'm not even sure it was necessary. I suspect there are universes that cheat horribly. Energy destroyed all the time (or at least shunted into other universes, since the Evil Goatee Universe even cheats at cheating). The speed of light is the second gear on a Peugeot hatchback. And Schrödinger's cat is just undead (that back and forth is for wuss universes).

/Keep your head up, brudda

I just altered the universe by your observing this post.ABSOLUTE POWER!

As the Founder of the religion of Pluriversalism, this is relevant to my interests.

Pluriversalism posits that not only is there a multiverse where every possible permutation of physical law and every possibility exists, but that this brute force attack on the problem of why there is something rather than nothing means that every possible religion is true--somewhere in the Pluriverse.

If you are very good you may go to the Heaven of your choice. If not, you may go to Baptist Heaven or Muslim Heaven, which is to say, that universe where the Baptist God or Allah is the real deal.

In other words, you can worship your various divinities in secure knowledge that they exist, just not here.

Try not to make this universe Hell for other people (or yourself). Be patient, you will be living in your own personal choice of Heaven or Hell soon enough--every time you are reincarnated into another universe is a chance to find the one of your dreams.

DarnoKonrad:Sure it does. In fact, depending on how big our universe is, there may be a copy of you out there posting on farl.com There's only so many probabilities before you have to cycle back through them

brantgoose:As the Founder of the religion of Pluriversalism, this is relevant to my interests.

Pluriversalism posits that not only is there a multiverse where every possible permutation of physical law and every possibility exists, but that this brute force attack on the problem of why there is something rather than nothing means that every possible religion is true--somewhere in the Pluriverse.

If you are very good you may go to the Heaven of your choice. If not, you may go to Baptist Heaven or Muslim Heaven, which is to say, that universe where the Baptist God or Allah is the real deal.

In other words, you can worship your various divinities in secure knowledge that they exist, just not here.

Try not to make this universe Hell for other people (or yourself). Be patient, you will be living in your own personal choice of Heaven or Hell soon enough--every time you are reincarnated into another universe is a chance to find the one of your dreams.

Robert A. Heinlein beat you to that idea in Stranger in a Strange Land.

Plurivalism raises an important question: how do you tell which Universe you are living in?

The short answer is that you can't.

The Universe of Creationists, where God is a perverse joker who makes fake fossils and hides them in sold rock to fool the evilutionists, is exactly like the Universe of Darwin, where the fossils are real and the God is a tinkerer with a strange affection for beetles. Both Universes look exactly alike because God wants you to believe, on Faith, not because reason and evidence tell you things are so. The Darwinian Universe, on the other hand, simply doesn't care whether you believe in it or not. A really good practical joke may look like no practical joke at all, and vice versa, if you are paranoid enough to live in a world which is a practical joke without any evidence as to who is playing what joke on whom.

In short, one man's Heaven is another man's Hell, and somewhere there is something for everybody. Be tolerant. Not so tolerant that you allow the schmucks to make a Hell of your current or future universe, but tolerant, because in the end, everybody is right and it doesn't really matter because we'll all die ten billion times before anybody proves anything to a religionist or a Conservative, Libertarian, or Republican.

That's the best I can do. The idea of an infinity of worlds in which everything that is possible, is, somewhere, is truly terrifying. It means that in some other worlds, every thing you do right here and now was, is and ever will be done wrong, and that in some of these worlds you are a monster of depravity and evil, no matter how hard you try to be good and do right here, there and everywhere.

It is depressing, but it makes perfect sense. The problem of evil is solved--rather than the best of all possible worlds, we live in a world. Not the best, not the worst, sort of mediocre in fact, like most of the rest of the possible worlds. God did not create evil, he doesn't prevent it (except in those worlds where he is real). In fact, gods are in the same situation as the rest of us sentient beings: they live in a world that they did not create, by rules they may not understand or discover. It's not good, but it could definitely be much, much worse. And nobody, not even God Almighty, is at fault. That's just the way the Pluriverse works. It has to be exhaustive of possibility because that is the only way it can be blameless and complete, eternal, infinite, and ever-lasting.

Try an Atheistical Buddhist Universe today. It might be a pleasant surprise. If not, you can always go back to the other universe or universes you think you're living in.

I sure hope I am not living in a world where the God of Karl Rove or Osama Bin Laden is King. But it probably wouldn't be much different from this world, only with more crazy conspiracies and junk.

His Shadow be upon you, Unbelieving Child of Light! Or something. I don't care. Neither does the universe. One of my firmer theological beliefs is that the Universe does not play favourites.

"All things come alike to all", as Scriptures put it. God sends his Sun and his rain upon the wicked and the righteous alike.

Some people, Job's Comforter types and Church Ladies, mostly, think that God punishes the wicked and rewards the good every day with disasters for the unrighteous and wealth and American flags for the righteous.

To paraphase Morbo the News Monster, "GOD DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY!"

God so loves the world that he letteth it alone to go its own way as best as can. To a given value of "God" and "world".

One of the common misconceptions that seep into ideas like the multiverse from TV and movies and other works of fiction is the idea that there would be a counterpart of you in other universes, or at least most universes.

Chaos theory makes this improbable. The world we live in is to sensitive to initial conditions for a universe to produce another you except, of course, when it does.

Consider how little it takes to interupt coitus, and thus the act of conception. Not only does the existence of "you" imply that a certain egg was fertilized by a certain sperm, but that this happened at a certain time and place. If it doesn't you get a different you unless that one sperm wins the race to fertilize that one egg.

If there's two eggs in the race, you might end up with a twin or replaced by a twin that you never knew was possible, let alone a threat.

In short, one second of distraction, and boom! There you isn't!

You don't have to kill your grandfather in order to creat a Grandfather Paradox. It would be sufficient for a dog to bark (like in the Philip K. Dick story which was the basis, loosely, for the movie The Adjustment Bureau). A dog barks and a child is conceived or not conceived. It is one person or another person altogether. It's not just you with a Van Dyke, or you with a different set of toys. It is somebody else altogether.

Ray Bradbury even bows to this literary convention in "A Sound of Thunder". In the short story, a mistep which kills a tiny moth causes world history to change from that moment onwards and the wrong man is elected President. It's Obama instead of Adolph Hitler. Or something.

In "reality", to a given degree of identity with Reality, even that small mistep might mean the human race does not evolve rather than spells certain English words differently and elects a dictator instead of a liberal democrat.

History is not repeatable--yes, on a very tiny scale, some events might get washed out by the large of law numbers, while close to the moment of diversion or digression, the changes might be small and unnoticeable, but in the fulness of time, such minute changes in the initial conditions of a chaotic system is likely to produce massive differences rather than superficial changes. It's not a quesiton of boy gets girl versus boy loses girl, its a question of boy gets girl or Farknarb gets Weedlesnooter.

History is, I firmly believe, chaos. Like the weather, if not because of the weather. The origin of the Chaos Theory involves weather prediction software--a scientist made a minute mistake and rather than correct it he ran the software simulation of climate with the error in, thinking it was too small to produce any significant error in the results. But the program was iterative, like the simple equation that produces the Mandelbrot set, the famous Gingerbread Man.

The result was a totally different world, so to speak. It may be true that a minute change in a few atoms of air or the amount of energy available to the system doesn't make much difference on, say, the total energy of the system. But it matters whether a hurricane hits the Leeward Islands or Washington, DC. It is world historical, not trivial, whether a major hurricane forms or does not form--and all for a slight difference in initial conditiosn, eight or more places below the zero.

In short, fiction plays by fictional and convenient rules. It makes for good stories. History, as Aristotle observes in The Poetics (Part One: Tragedy), does not have to make sense or be plausible because it is just shiat that happens.

It's a pity the other half of The Poetics, on Comedy, was almost entirely lost. But it would be a different world if it hadn't been. There would have been no Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and thus no movie starring Shawn Connery, or Shane, or Sheila, or whoever it was.

Every little thing can become a major problem if it is left to iterate. That's chaos in a nutshell.

If there is a God, he really does care if little sparrows fall. Because the whole shebang could be farked up by the loss of an ant let alone a sparrow or a human being or a planet or a few billion galaxies. The Universe is totally scalar, Dude! Like in that stupid movie, The Butterfly Effect, things just don't work out for the better all that easily. Actually, it's a fairly good treatment of the philosophical issues of time travel and multiple worlds. At least there's not much of a Happy Ending to spoil the premise for no conceivable reason other than the laws of fiction requiring one.

Firstly, I don't like the term multiverse. I accept it's here to stay, but the term universe is encompassing enough to include multiple instances of our and/or other physical realities and realms.

That said, there is just so much we don't understand. It's what I love about science. Not what it shows us to be true, but the questions it allows us to ask.The unknowns the knowns show us of... as Rumsfeld might phrase it :P

In every blackhole there may be another universe. It might be ours! Just changed a little. It might be another one all together. It may be the necklace that holds together the pearls of each reality (hey! no laughing, i hear you snickering)

Life itself could be an interdimensional phenomenon. Time itself isn't a dimension but a perception we hold as we shift from one static universe/reality to the next. Everything from a thought to a chemical reaction simply being the next in a long string of infinite universes/realities going down the line. I like this idea and believe goldfish actually experience everything in reverse. From this point of view, there really could be turtles all the way down, along with everything else!

The further we look out, the harder we must look within. Are the answers out there? Or do they lie within us, dependent not upon exploration and observation, but understanding and philosophy.

Well folks, my brain hurts, and that means it's time to say good bye!Hope to catch you again on the next episode of, "None of This shiat Makes Any Sense!"Up next, another new episode of "Damn universe!? You crazy!"

brantgoose:One of the common misconceptions that seep into ideas like the multiverse from TV and movies and other works of fiction is the idea that there would be a counterpart of you in other universes, or at least most universes.

Well there would, because the concept is there are infinite universes. Infinite means every possible way things can exist in the universe, does in some universe out there.

HOWEVER, when it comes to science fiction... yeah, they skip over the part about knowing which other universe to go to where "you" also exist in a similar enough manner.

If I jumped to another universe somehow, there's a near infinite-to-1 chance that I don't exist there. Hell, there's probably a near infinite-to-1 chance that my body would not be able to survive even a millisecond there.

downstairs:brantgoose: One of the common misconceptions that seep into ideas like the multiverse from TV and movies and other works of fiction is the idea that there would be a counterpart of you in other universes, or at least most universes.

Well there would, because the concept is there are infinite universes. Infinite means every possible way things can exist in the universe, does in some universe out there.

HOWEVER, when it comes to science fiction... yeah, they skip over the part about knowing which other universe to go to where "you" also exist in a similar enough manner.

If I jumped to another universe somehow, there's a near infinite-to-1 chance that I don't exist there. Hell, there's probably a near infinite-to-1 chance that my body would not be able to survive even a millisecond there.

See, science is about questioning the unknown and exploring the possible. Not just making observations and conducting experiments... all of it is for not if you don't first have the glimmer of insight, intelligence and imagination to draft the hypothesis.

There are many supposed facts out there and there is no telling how many of them will get steamrolled by men much smarter than you or I one day.

You keep on *knowing* things and saying "of course not". Ignorant closed-mined people often *know* a lot. They also have no vision.

It's much much more fun and scientifically productive to say maybe to everything, let anything be possible and let science guide the ship from truth to truth.

My problem with Multiverse theory is my problem with string theory: People talk about it like it's real and been proven (I'm looking at YOU, Brian greene) just because the math works out.

The math eventually worked out for epicycles, too, but it didn't mean the geocentric view of the universe was *correct*./Yes yes okay, technically we can use a geocentric view of the universe and make the math work out like it is correc,t and *technically* it is a valid reference frame, but you understand what I mean.

brantgoose:One of the common misconceptions that seep into ideas like the multiverse from TV and movies and other works of fiction is the idea that there would be a counterpart of you in other universes, or at least most universes.

Chaos theory makes this improbable.

Problem is, in an infinite number of universes, even improbable comes up an infinite number of times. The probability has to be zero chance of repetition for an infinite number of universes to not have another iteration of you, and how likely is that if the probability that you exist is (obviously unless you're some seriously wigged out philosopher) not zero?

Admittedly, this is mainly wishful thinking, inasmuch as I'd like to think there's a version of me out there happily banging away at any one of a number of Hollywood Starlets, Victoria's Secret Models, hot college friends, and my neighbor a few years ago. A man can dream.....